May 23, 2007

Movie: Multi-tasking

Learning to crawl and chew fist at the same time!

This movie helps to explain why Felix never did something that babies commonly do when learning to crawl: he never crawled backwards. Apparently, babies usually push with their legs and arms at the same time when first experimenting with crawling. But since they have better coordination with their arms the effect is to push themselves backwards. Obviously Felix’s arms were not in play since he was too busy stuffing them into his face. This gave his legs free play to move him forward. Eventually, he figured out that the arms had a role to play as well, but by then he was already going in the right direction.